This chapter deals with the development and increasing prevalence of steam-powered technology in the life and culture of the 1830s. It discusses the vexed question of the relationship between liberalism and empire and the contribution of liberal progressives and technological radicals, such as Thomas Love Peacock and Thomas Babington Macaulay, to the process of empire. It argues that a war begun in 1839 between the British and the Qing empires acts as a summation of the progress in the decade towards a new form of steam-powered colonialism. The ‘Steam Romanticism’ of the 1830s had a strongly imperialist dimension. This chapter discusses the crucial contribution of the Romantic period satirical novelist and essayist to this process. As a leading administrator of the East India Company, Peacock was intimately involved with the commissioning, design, and construction of new, steam-powered vessels for use by the Company, notably the iron-hulled warship the Nemesis, the presence of which proved crucial in the First Opium War with China.

Two hundred years ago, in the early hours of the morning of 29 August 1816, William Pitt, Lord Amherst, unrested after travelling overnight, was apparently unceremoniously manhandled in an attempt to usher him physically with his two deputies, George Thomas Staunton and Henry Ellis, into the presence of the Jiaqing Emperor at the Summer Palace of Yuanming Yuan. Fatigued, separated from his diplomatic credentials and ambassadorial robes, Amherst and his deputies resisted, and left the palace in anger. It was reported to the emperor that Amherst's inability to attend was occasioned by illness, as was that of his two deputies. The emperor, discovering the ambassador was not ill, immediately dismissed the embassy without granting an imperial audience and rejected its ‘tribute’ of gifts. Amherst's party then began its long overland journey south to Canton (Guangzhou) where it embarked for home.

British accounts of the embassy lay its ostensible ‘failure’ to secure an audience not on the emperor, but on the scheming of senior court officials who had unwisely assured him that Amherst was preparing to perform the problematic ceremony of the full imperial koutou or ‘kowtow’ with its three kneelings accompanied by three knockings of the forehead for each prostration. After a process of negotiation Amherst instead offered to perform the compromised version of the ceremony that his more famous predecessor, Viscount George Macartney, had agreed to undertake for the Qianlong Emperor at Jehol in September 1793, kneeling on one knee and bowing his head thrice as he would before his royal master, George III. Indeed in an extension of the compromise the ambassador offered to perform this kneeling not once but three times with the full complement of nine bows of the head in total. The Qianlong Emperor had accepted a compromise in 1793; his fifth son and successor would not. The expensive items brought by the British as ‘presents’ for the Jiaqing Emperor, costing some £20,000, were not accepted, though afterwards, the emperor agreed to a very limited and symbolic exchange of a few items in his apparent recognition of the sincerity and obedience of the Prince Regent in sending this tribute. The embassy left Canton for home on 28 January 1817, suffering shipwreck and pirate attack on the return voyage, and visiting the deposed emperor Napoleon on St Helena (who told Amherst he was very foolish not to kowtow), arriving back in Britain on 17 August 1817.

There has been a great deal of historical and cultural criticism relating to the first British embassy to arrive in China, led by Viscount Macartney, of 1792–94, including three substantial historical accounts, but comparatively little has been written about its successor, either from the British or the Chinese viewpoints, which has tended to be largely viewed, when it is noted at all, as a farcical repetition of, or postscript to, its more famous predecessor. This is unfair. The embassy, along with the two earlier British attempts to take possession of the Portuguese enclave of Macao in 1802 and 1808, urgently demand the serious attention of both historians and critics of the cultural relations between China and Britain in the nineteenth century. This essay, along with that of Robert Markley, argues for the importance of the embassy as well as its crucial significance to British understandings of China and the accounts to which it gave rise. They make a case for the significance of the still largely unexplored accounts produced by the embassy and the extensive knowledge they contained. With the publication in 2014 of Wensheng Wang's major reappraisal of the reforming reign of the Jiaqing Emperor (1796–1820), we are now presented with a more complex and nuanced account of this crucial period in Chinese history. Whereas H. B. Morse referred to ‘the degenerate and corrupt court’ of 1816, Wang instead describes a frugal, thoughtful, selfcritical and reforming monarch, keenly aware of the British attempts to take over Macao and nervous about their power. The Jiaqing Emperor emerges not as a ruler imprisoned in an ossified ritualistic ceremonialism but one capable of reacting pragmatically to the complex and challenging political events that faced him.

Contemporary responses to the earlier Macartney embassy were certainly mixed. Macartney and his admirers regarded his embassy as, on the whole, something of a success. He purred about how his mission had ‘laid a foundation of amity, good offices, and immediate intercourse with the Imperial Court’. Contemporary views of the Amherst embassy generally viewed it as a failure; John Crawfurd, reviewing Henry Ellis's Journal of the Proceedings of the late Embassy to China for the Edinburgh Review, commented: ‘everybody who knew anything of the matter, we believe, was prepared for that catastrophe of this new Chinese mission, which actually ensued’. Historian Patrick Tuck has claimed that the embassy ‘was not merely a failure, it was a fiasco’.

The Gothic is frequently identified with two obsessions: a concern with otherness and alterity, and a compulsion to explore socially aberrant desires and transgress boundaries. It is also a mode that disdains generic purity and embraces hybridity, hence the dismay it inspired in many eighteenth-century neoclassicist critics scornful of its mixing of genres, its stylistic excesses, its troubling popularity and its resolute illegitimacy. All these generic hallmarks of Gothic can be seen in its febrile intertwining with that other, older eighteenth-century and then Romantic mode, Orientalism. The Gothic and the Oriental manifest a shared concern with representing the alien and the other to European cultures, yet it is also a truism of Gothic and Orientalist criticism that both may be used as a means of representing the dark, irrational and monstrous at the heart of British society. The despotism and violence of Gothic and Orientalist narratives often reflect on the iniquities of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century patriarchal and bourgeois ideologies, especially the power of men over women. Both Gothic and Oriental were crucial modes by which British nationality and subjectivity were constructed (Sage 1988; Schmitt 1997). They were also notable modes in which authors used exoticism and excess to explore alternative or unstable sexual identities and desires. Despite the frequently heavy, often unconvincing surface moralism common to both genres, such narratives were able vicariously to employ exoticism to represent non-heteronormative desires and practices, safely distanced from the reality of an often savage eighteenth-century and nineteenth-century social and legal repression.

The Romantic period has sometimes been described as an ‘Oriental Renaissance’, as the growing European fascination with, and discovery of, Eastern languages, literatures and commodities such as tea, silks and porcelain fuelled the imaginations of writers and readers with Eastern or Oriental subjects. Both Gothic and Romanticism developed from Orientalism. In particular, the translation of the collection of popular Arabian and Persian tales – Alf layla wa layla, known in English as The Thousand and One Nights or The Arabian Nights by Antoine Galland – into French (1704) and by others into English (1712 onwards) firmly established the British cultural fascination with the East (Schwab 1984; Leask 1992; Sardar 1999; Macfie 2002; Ballaster 2005; Hoeveler and Cass 2006; Makdisi and Nussbaum 2008; Cavaliero 2010; Garcia 2011).